I became very despondent and withdrawn, took to my bed, and stayed there for weeks.

I knew she wouldn’t live forever, but fooled myself into believing that her departure would be someday far FAR into the future. When it happened, I was shocked and devastated. I still find it hard to believe.

Eventually I had to face the reality of my “new normal”, and gradually began to pull myself out of the pit.

But during those months under the covers, I did a lot of thinking. Loss is often the catalyst for change, and losing my mother made me re-examine everything in my life, including my business.

Which brings me to my confession…

I’m an online publisher and CPA marketer at heart.

I know, I know.

When I started GeoLocal.com back in 2001, I really enjoyed helping business owners use the internet to promote local. For years I developed websites, wrote newsletters and published all all kinds of books and articles on offline marketing and consulting. I got lots of clients, most through word of mouth, referrals and speaking. It was great.

But somewhere along the way, I discovered CPA marketing, and found it be a lot of fun and quite lucrative. If you’re not familiar, CPA stands for Cost Per Action, and it means you get paid when someone clicks your link and completes an action (fill out a form, get a quote, sign up for free trial, etc.)

At first it was an experiment, to see how it worked. Over time I got good at CPA, so much that it became our primary source of income, and offline consulting took a back seat.

Truth be told, I didn’t enjoy the client getting part of offline consulting. I dislike asking for the sale, going for “the close”, reciting “some will, some won’t, so what?”, blah, blah. It’s just not me.

Coming from the corporate world, I had all the clients I could handle, I wasn’t used to chasing people, trying to convince them they need me. If they’re too stupid to realize that, they deserve to go out of business.

For awhile I tried to do both, but ended up spreading myself too thin. Working on too many projects is the kiss of death, yet there I was, distracted and unfocused.

When my Mom got sick last year, something had to give. I stopped creating offline products and acquiring new clients for my services. Only the simplest things to accomplish got done. Anything that couldn’t be done virtually, i,e. from a hospital room or my Mom’s house was out.

After Mom’s death, I took a long hard look at my business. Once I was able to step back and look at things from afar, it became very clear that I needed to pick ONE business model and stick to it. And for me that is online publishing and CPA marketing.

I’ll still do web projects that come my way, but all that other sales related stuff like prospecting, followup calls and emails to close the deal, etc.? No.

So why am I telling you all this? Well, my emails/updates started out about one thing but the focus is changing, so I felt obliged to say something.

Honestly I felt reluctant to discuss this because offline marketing has been my cause for so long. I’ve met lots of great people over the years and didn’t want to those relationships to change.

But just because you start down a path doesn’t mean you have to continue. Like Maya Angelou said, if you don’t like the path you’re on, step off and make a new one. And that goes for ALL areas in life.

Ok, having said all that, I’m not going that far off the path. Almost everything can be applied to offline. i.e….
Organic Traffic / SEO
Paid Traffic
CPA Marketing
Content creation
Trusted curation
Keyword & niche research
Research tools
Video marketing
Social media marketing
Authority site building

If you really really only want to hear about how to sell offline marketing services and nothing else, well then I’ll understand if you unsubscribe.

Otherwise, stick around and see what develops on my new home base, www.SharonOdom.com…

Sharon

p.s. Thank you so much for all the emails and FaceBook messages of support, it really touched my heart!

p.p.s. I still have IM Stock Photos and RewardThemes.com — they come in handy for online publishing and website creation. I have some great offline/local related domains names that I’ll probably put up for auction…

If you’re looking to create a local business directory using WordPress, here’s a plug-in that looks pretty good and best of all it’s FREE. It’s called Connections and here’s the link: http://connections-pro.com

The author offers a few add-ons ($15 – $20 each) such as 6 custom templates and a couple of pro modules, one of them a CSV import utility, but the plug-in itself costs nothing. There are lots of links to live sites using the plug-in, some using his templates, others with custom templates.

I think I’m going to get the cMap template and maybe the CSV utility — I’ve tried a lot of directory plugins and themes, paid and free, and found most of them wanting, so I was very happy to find this one, and really glad it’s a plug-in and not a theme.

It doesn’t have payment processing and all that jazz but it still beats a lot of others I’ve seen. I’m using it for a local business directory for my community to showcase interviews with small business owners. (If you have a hard time getting small business owners to listen to you, try asking them for an interview, and listen to them instead.)

Is it the perfect local business directory plug-in? No, but it’s pretty darn good, especially for the $0 price tag! So check it out and let me know what you think.

Words of wisdom from my wonderful Mother, it was typed on a sheet of paper she gave to me, author unknown…

When things go wrong, as they sometimes will,
When the road you’re trudging seems all uphill,
When the funds are low and the debts are high,
And you want to smile, but you have to sigh,
When care is pressing you down a bit,
Rest, if you must, but don’t you quit.

Life is queer with its twists and turns,
As every one of us sometimes learns,
And many a failure turns about,
When he might have won had he stuck it out;
Don’t give up though the pace seems slow —
You may succeed with another blow.

Often the goal is nearer than,
It seems to a faint and faltering man,
Often the struggler has given up,
When he might have captured the victor’s cup,
And he learned too late when the night slipped down,
How close he was to the golden crown.

Success is failure turned inside out —
The silver tint of the clouds of doubt,
And you never can tell how close you are,
It may be near when it seems so far,
So stick to the fight when you’re hardest hit —
It’s when things seem worst that you must not quit.

Back in 2007, I read an article in the Houston Chronicle by columnist Leon Hale that made me stop and think. Here’s what he said:

When you get as old as I am, people come around and ask questions like, “If you could crank the calendars back and become 21 again, would you do anything different?”

You bet I would.

To begin with, let’s deal with the matter of backing up and becoming 21 again. Obviously this is not going to happen, but it’s a game old people like to play. Most of them say, “No, thanks. I wouldn’t go back to 21 even if I got the chance.”

You won’t catch me saying that. I’d accept that gift in a split minute. Be 21 again? Bring it on. I’ve already lived into my mid-80s, and those years have gone by like a drag race. I’d dearly love to have half a dozen more decades.

So what would I do different?

First, on my 21st birthday I would begin keeping a journal. Every night I’d record where I went and what I did and with whom, even if the day has been routine and dreary. I would do that until I got old again.

Reason this is important to me, I figure I’ve forgotten at least half the detail of the years I’ve lived. I’ve forgotten hundreds of names, places, events, remarks made, kindnesses done, wounds dealt.

I grieve the loss of these details. They would be of huge value to me now. They represent a large part of my life, and they’re gone. It’s like half of me is already dead.

So in this little fantasy I’m having today, I’d keep the journal …”

Then he goes on to talk about learning to play the piano and learning another language, which is another “I wish I would’ve…” for me. All those years that I was single and free could’ve been spent learning Spanish.

Ok, so even though I’m quite a few years past 21, there’s still a lot of candy left in this piñata, so I will keep a journal from now on. And maybe I’ll still learn another language.

The date of that column was July 29, 2007 and I’ve kept a daily journal ever since (the 2 paragraphs above were lifted from that day’s entry).

Every night I fire up LifeJournal and type in the details of my day, no matter how mundane. Sometimes I’ll even make notes during the day in a draft email so I don’t forget, then copy it over to LJ at night. I find it very therapeutic to unburden my soul and pour out everything. I probably would have done this years ago if there had been a way to password protect the entries. Now I can write anything I want, knowing my secrets are safe.

And every now and then I’ll go back and read some of those entries and you know what? Leon’s right — I’ve forgotten many of those details already, and it hasn’t even been that long! Here’s an entry that I just love…and had totally forgotten about:

Isaiah said something that I thought was so cute I had to write it down so I wouldn’t forget. We were talking about when we lived in California and I mentioned going to Disney studios to work. He said, “I didn’t know you had to go out for work.”

Isn’t that great? Here’s a child who has always known his mother to work at home. Of course they know I work, but I love it that they see me making money from home, with my own business. Already I try to stress having their own business — when Sierra says she wants to work at the pet store, I say “no, you want to own the pet store and work there when you feel like it.”

The journal can also be useful for figuring out what day we did this or that. Really, it’s like being able to recapture and relive great moments and memories that would otherwise be lost forever. Life is in the details, and when the details are lost, you’re left with lots of empty gaps. In my 20s I used to make cryptic notes on a calendar but without the details, it’s like peeking through the window into someone else’s life, wishing I could see more.

So for all of you younger folks, heed Leon’s words and start keeping that journal now. You’ll be glad you did.

Next time you’re having one of those days, watch this. Sent to me by my cousin Harold Odom, at a time when I really needed it! Thanks cuz!

Remember, everybody is going through something. Let’s try to have an attitude of gratitude! And that includes me … thank you to the Universe for this day and for all that’s good in my life, a list too long to make here!

Well now I’ve heard everything. I had taken my son’s phone away for an infraction, knowing that was the best way to get his attention. After a couple of days of being cut off from his friends and having tried everything else to get it back, he came to me and said he NEEDED his phone for school.

Now, I managed to get through high school, college and graduate school without a cell phone, so I really wanted to hear this. Go ahead, explain to me why you NEED a cell phone for school. This is going to be good.

You ready? He takes notes on his phone. Really? You’d rather type on an itty bitty keyboard than use good ole paper and pencil?

Yes, he tried it.

Did it work?

Just in case there was a grain of truth in there, I let him have his phone for an hour to retrieve his “notes”. Then it was back on lockdown until he saw the error of his ways.

Out of 594 visitors to this client’s site, 167 were on a mobile device. That’s 28% of the visitors that were basically shown the door as soon as they arrived. In this case, they have must really wanted the information because look at how many pages they visited on the (very) NON mobile optimized site!

Once you really look at the stats and grasp the story they tell, how can any business owner not see the need for a mobile site? This simple exercise has made a believer out of me — the facts don’t lie. If only we could get Google Analytics installed on every website…

Today my sister and I took our mother to the Apple Store to buy a computer. After playing around with the MacBook, we realized it would be overkill for what she needed — email and photos — so we looked at the iPad. I had played with one a few months ago and know I will get one at some point, but really thought the screen would be too small for her.

But this nice young man, Brett, helped show her how to do things and before you knew it, she whipped out her credit card and said “I’ll take it!”

Here’s a picture of Brett and my mother holding her new iPad.

My mother is no ordinary 92 year old grandmother — she’s been texting on her cell phone for the last year or two, and not one with a full keyboard either. She took to the touchscreen keyboard right away, and before I left the house, she was up and running with her gmail account.

I sent her an email asking did she like her new toy and she responded…